The skin of the programme

The only head on the site is a sculpted profile printed as cells of the programme's own words: 50 sessions and 77 names set in Martian Mono, justified into the shape of a face, two inks on black, the planes that catch the light in cream and the hollows in orange. Ask it a question and the head is reprinted from the sessions that answer.

The story

ETS27's theme is Free Your Mind, and the owner's own seed was a mind in free space. This concept keeps the mind and throws away the render. The head is never shown as an object, only as a print. A signed-distance head is ray-marched once per cell into a grid of 160 by 60 cells on the desktop: a profile drawn as a polygon (crown, forehead, brow, the dip of the nasion, nose, lips, the fold under the lower lip, chin, the jaw and the neck) cuts a sculpted volume (cranium, cheekbones, eye sockets, an ear with its bowl, a neck), so the silhouette is exactly the drawn line and the inside still has planes to catch the light. A second pass sets the programme into that silhouette: every row of the head is filled with whole words and justified so that its last letter lands on the edge of the face. The profile is drawn by the ends of words; no word is ever cut by the head.

The light sits high, in front of the face and toward the visitor, the way a plaster cast is lit. The planes that face it print in cream at weight 800, the side of the head in orange at 500, and the hollows (the eye socket, under the nose, under the lip, under the jaw, the bowl of the ear) in orange at 300. The contour is a rim three cells wide in cream where the edge faces the light and in orange where it turns under, with a black gap of two cells outside it so the figure separates from the faint programme behind it. The print is cropped by two straight lines, under the corner lockups and above the scroll verb, and by the left edge of the screen, so the head is a fragment on the poster, never a mascot in its centre.

Below the fold the same two inks and the same mono carry the standard site: numbered answers, a full-bleed screen where the dates are printed from the programme, the theme with the ledger of editions, the lineup as an edge-to-edge contact sheet over a ledger of all 77 names, a programme that leaves the label column and runs the full width under the numerals 3 4 5 6, tickets, the place and a lab-notebook footer.

Typography

Display: Bitcount Prop Double, weight 600, font-variation-settings 'ELSH' 50 and 'ELXP' 0: solid square elements, so the display face is built from the same kind of cell as the head. 168 px, line-height 0.88. Used for FREE YOUR MIND, the answer numerals, the readout 77, the day numerals 3 4 5 6, AUSTIN and the prices. (The round elements of ELSH 0 read as a toy sign; ELSH 25 in the served font draws outlined card-suit shapes, not squares, so 50 is the square cut.)
Text: Martian Mono 15 px, weight 300, line-height 1.55 for reading; weight 500 for session titles and names; weight 800 at width 112.5 for the question headings and the ETS27 wordmark; the mind's say line at width 75, weight 400, in orange.
Labels: Martian Mono 11 px, weight 500, uppercase, tracked +0.06 em: times, formats, the band, the composer verbs, footnotes and the state line.
The skin: Martian Mono at 12.857 px, a 9 by 15 px cell at DPR 1 (the advance of this face is exactly 0.7 em), weights 300, 500 and 800 in a glyph atlas at device resolution; on the phone 8.5 px, a 6 by 10 px cell, so the smaller head still has enough rows to be a head.
Ratio: 168 : 15 : 11, eleven to one between display and text, nothing in between; 136 px display on desktop screens shorter than 860 px; the phone runs 104 : 13 : 10.

Colour world

Black #0B0C10, the paper.
Cream #F2E8D5, the first ink: lit planes, the rim, titles, names, the printed dates.
Dusk orange #E8782A, the second ink: shadow tones, times, the mind's voice, links and live signals.
Tints of the two inks only: cream at 50 %, 26 % and 16 % for secondary text and hairlines; orange at 92 % and 55 % for the head's middle and shadow tones; orange at 1.8 % (1.5 % on the phone) for the ghost of the programme outside the head, blanked under every line of type on the poster; orange at 8 % (6.5 % on the phone) for the field the dates are printed on. No third colour, no gradients, no bloom, no glow; tone steps are softened by an ordered Bayer 4 by 4 dither per cell.

Layout grammar

The facts live on the edges and never in the centre. Over the poster: ETS27 · Energy Thought Summit · 14th edition · Zpryme top-left; Austin, Texas · May 3–6, 2027 · Tickets top-right. Once the poster has scrolled away the two lockups become one full-width black band with a hairline: ETS27, an index (answers · theme · lineup · programme · tickets · place) in the label voice, and the dates with Tickets as the only orange link. Nothing scrolls half-visible under a knockout any more.
The first screen is a poster. Head left, nose tip at 42 % of the width, cropped by the band line, the left edge and a straight line above the scroll verb. FREE YOUR MIND alone at the top right with the two-line intro under it; the composer rule and its three verbs across the bottom right, 150 px above the bottom edge so the fork survives a consent strip; SCROLL ↓ at the same height bottom-left. The right half of the screen is clean black: no eyebrow, no caption, nothing in the bottom-right corner.
Below the fold: a 220 px label column and a content column on 48 px gutters for the answers, the theme, the lineup ledger, tickets and the place. Three moments break that beat: the dates screen (MAY 3–6 printed edge to edge from the programme, with one caption line: 4 days · Austin, Texas · May 3–6, 2027 · Free Your Mind), the contact sheet (the 26 portraits as one band from edge to edge, no captions under the tiles, names in the ledger below), and the programme, which runs the full width in four columns under the day numerals.
On the phone the hero is a flow column: the head, whole except for its crown, in the top 45 %, then the title, the composer and the scroll verb, all within the first screen; the print stops above the title. The band shows ETS27 and May 3–6, 2027 · Tickets; every section stacks to one column; the editions ledger stacks year over venue and theme; the contact sheet runs seven across.

Motion and life

On load the grid develops in over 1.3 s: each cell flips from blank to its character when a random threshold passes, so the head surfaces rather than fades.
At rest the head breathes (±0.6 % scale on a seven-second cycle) and turns ±3° on a fourteen-second cycle; the light moves over the type as it does, while the silhouette of words stays set. It turns a few degrees toward the pointer.
When the composer has focus the head turns about 17° toward the visitor and is reprinted against its new silhouette; when it loses focus it turns back and is reprinted again.
A question rebuilds the stream from the matching records and runs the same develop over 1.3 s; the lineup dims the names the mind did not mean; the new answer develops in through an SVG noise threshold over 0.8 s and the page scrolls to it.
The dates screen develops the first time it is scrolled into view (1.1 s, random cell order).
Portraits are the head's material at portrait scale: each is baked once into 36 by 36 cells in exactly the three values (paper, orange, cream) by bake-portraits.py, kept in portraits/ and inlined in the page as data URIs, so every tile renders on every phone without a request, a filter or a lazy load.
The loop pauses when the hero leaves the viewport or the tab is hidden; prefers-reduced-motion renders one frame and skips every develop and the caret blink; the footer carries a motion on / off control as text, not an icon.

The fork and the mind

The fork is two verbs of unequal weight printed on the page: TYPE, in orange at the head of the composer rule ("a question · the head is reprinted from the sessions that answer"), and SCROLL ↓ ("read the programme in order", with the ETS26 sample note on the desktop). The standard route is the page read in order; the mind is the page rearranged. The trick is explained once, at the place where it happens.
The composer is a rule, not a box: a blinking caret, a hairline, and three suggestion verbs set along it (who speaks tuesday · what does a pass cost · where is it), Enter implied. A second line to write on closes the answers section; under it sits the one question other visitors asked on this page ("is there a student rate" · not published yet), out of the corner where a chat widget would live.
An answer is a change in the material, then a section in the grid. 01 Who's speaking Tuesday is already composed on the page: the question as the heading, the say line in the mind's own axis (Martian Mono width 75, orange), the 15 Tuesday sessions as ledger rows with their people, and the source as a numbered footnote in visitor words ("the programme as published on 2026-10-13"). Each new question appends 02, 03 and so on; older answers stay as sections you can re-read. The mockup carries a rule-based composer over the programme (days, formats, tracks, people, organisations, title words, tickets, place, dates) so the live page answers for real.
Thinking is visible as the cells re-developing, the lineup dimming and the head turning; there is no shimmer, no dot row, no bubble, no avatar and no sparkle.
State is exposed lab-notebook style in the footer, which is also the only place the method is described: snapshot 2026-10-13 · 77 speakers · 50 sessions · sample data.

What changed in this pass (2026-10-15)

Round-one jurors scored 6/7/6/8 and 6/6/6/7. The version they saw is frozen in v1/. This pass made the head read as a head at 240 px wide (profile polygon, frontal-top light, a three-cell rim with a black gap, the nose moved from 36 % to 42 %), set every row of the head in whole justified words so no word breaks at the rim, removed the hero eyebrow and the bottom-right question, raised the fork, replaced the per-block knockouts with a full-width band and an index, fixed the phone (subtitle clipping, the caption colliding with the head, 26 blank portrait tiles), dropped the ghost from 3.5 % to 1.8 % and blanked it under type, squared the display face, and broke the one-beat page with the printed dates, the edge-to-edge contact sheet and a full-width programme. Moving bios and long paragraphs to Literata was not done: it would add a third face to a two-face system.

What to build next

Replace the rule-based composer with the product's mind, keeping the contract this mockup already honours: the answer names records, the page chooses the type and the spacing, and the skin is rebuilt from the records' names and titles.
A sculpted mesh head (or a scanned bust) in place of the polygon-and-ellipsoid SDF, rendered through the same cell pass and the same justified setting; the pass does not care where the depth comes from.
Portraits for the whole lineup once they can be served from a host that allows it (26 of the 77 have one in the snapshot).
Speaker and session pages as the same skin at smaller scale: a speaker's page prints their portrait from the words of their own sessions.
Placement numbers for tablet aspect ratios (only 1440 by 900, short desktop screens and 390-wide phones are tuned), blue noise for the develop threshold, and a measured budget on a 2019 phone (the readback and the justified setting run on every relayout, which is cheap but not free).

Risks

ASCII-art AI cosplay, the seed's own risk line. It is held off by two inks, a Bayer dither and nothing else, no bloom, a head that is cropped and never centred, and words that read as words at the cell size; it would collapse the moment a third colour, a glow or a single-glyph atlas appears.
The head reads because of its silhouette. The profile polygon, the light and the crops are tuned for 1440 by 900 and 390-wide phones; another aspect ratio needs its own placement numbers, and a heavier or busier stream would need the thresholds checked again at thumbnail size.
Mono as the only text face is right for an instrument and a strain for an hour of reading.
Everything on the page is ETS26 relabelled and says so on the scroll verb (desktop), in the section notes, every answer footnote and the footer; shipping any of it without those marks would misstate the lineup.